New Way to Test Self-Driving Cars Could Cut 99.9 Percent of Validation Costs

Mobility researchers at the University of Michigan have devised a new way to test autonomous vehicles that bypasses the billions of miles they would need to log for consumers to consider them road-ready.

The process, which was developed using data from more than 25 million miles of real-world driving, can cut the time required to evaluate robotic vehicles’ handling of potentially dangerous situations by 300 to 100,000 times. And it could save 99.9 percent of testing time and costs, the researchers say.

They outline the approach in a new white paper published by Mcity, a U-M-led public-private partnership to accelerate advanced mobility vehicles and technologies.